


Herald of the Golden Dawn

by Selene_Dreamwalker



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, Inspired by Fanfiction, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Possibly Epic Length, Sorry Not Sorry, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 10:03:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10511523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selene_Dreamwalker/pseuds/Selene_Dreamwalker
Summary: Alibaba has a dream he's had many times before. He's standing at a path that forks two ways. Both ways fog and fade in detail as they go on, but one gets darker, more perilous, and there's something poisonous about the mist. The other is ordinary, like any road gets when clouds decide to greet the ground, and while there's danger as there is on any path, it's safe enough, as things go.One night in Sindria, the dream changes.There's three forks on the road this time. One to the right, dark and malicious as always. One to the left, like a perfectly normal misty day. But the one directly ahead . . . it's bright. Bright and shining, gay and glad, going on forever into a golden dawn. Alibaba can't help but take a step forward, enchanted by something so . . . hopeful.Light blinded him-





	1. The Seal Breaks

      _'Sinbad sure knows how to throw one hell of a party'_ _,_ Alibaba thought to himself a bit wryly, trudging his partied-out self to the room he, Aladdin and Morgiana had decided to share. He never thought one day he'd think nothing of sharing a sleeping space with others again, but he was grateful for their steadfast, friendly warmth. He might've gone mad from sheer loneliness by now without them.  _'Just wish he knew how to lower the level of merriness a bit, or'd at least left me out of some of it. The others had fun, though, and I'll recover. All in all, a good day'._  

He flopped onto the always-weird-unfamiliar-familiar softness of the rich people's bed _(he never really got quite used to it in Balbadd, though he grew accustomed to it eventually. Roughing it on the road as a caravan driver, then through various inns here and there, and then Sindria's extravagance? Alibaba sort of gave up after that_ ), adjusted until comfortable when Morgiana and Aladdin joined him, and slowly slipped into sleep.

He had the dream again.

* * *

_It always began the same, and it wasn't at all frightening, was the thing. He was walking down a road, like you'd find anywhere, though he couldn't pinpoint it exactly, because it was always different. The landscape was ever-changing, as you'd expect in a dream. One moment it was the blazing desert heat, another down a windy grassy plain, another over a chill rocky mountain, another through a muggy lush jungle._

_Always, a bit of walking - a long time, and not long at all, as dreams do - he came to a fork in the road. Two ways, that seemed the same at first glance, but differed wildly the further down you looked._

_Both paths were covered in gently rolling fog, moving in the exact same swirling patterns._

_To the right, it was dark, and one got the feeling that things waited just off the path to snag the unwary traveler. It gave off a feeling of creeping malice, knives in the back, and poison in the food. A perilous path._

_To the left, it was not well-lit at all, but easier to see than the other, and one got the feeling a road well and often traveled. Danger, of course, as life does, but somehow ordinary. A common path._

_Alibaba had this dream often, and it never changed. He tried, as much as he could, to go down the left path, but sometimes he tripped on something. Sometimes he didn't watch where he was going, and he took a wrong turn. Sometimes he could correct himself, sometime he couldn't. It was the road of life he walked down, and mistakes were made. Wash, rinse, repeat._

_Something changed._

_That night, as Alibaba walked along his ever-changing road, when he came to the fork, he was surprised-but-not-surprised, as one is in dreams. The road forked_ three _ways this time._

_The perilous path to the right, as usual. The common path to the left, as usual. But the third straight ahead. . ._

_It was like unto the others, and nothing like them at once. It was fogged the same, in the same swirling, rolling fog, but it was bright. Details faded as it went on, as the other two did, but this one was bright._

_Bright and shining, gay and glad, forever into the golden dawn. Alibaba couldn't help but step onto it, enchanted by something so . . . hopeful._

_Light blinded him-_

_O~O~O_

_\- and he was_ somewhere else _._

_A cave tunnel, with crystals growing out of the walls and ceiling, softly glowing enough to see the way by. Alibaba walked forward, of course. There was something at the end he needed to see. The certainty of that went bone deep, and he didn't doubt it in the slightest._

_When he walked out into the open cave, he had to stop for a moment in overwhelmed amazement. Prismatic crystals, large ones, everywhere. In the middle of the room was a spring, bubbling up cheerily from somewhere below, covering the center of the cavern neatly. And in the middle of the spring was one huge crystal, throwing rainbows all over the walls from the sunlight streaming down. It was bigger than an Imuchakk man, and for a moment Alibaba couldn't do anything but gape in astonishment, then he realized there was a shadow in the big crystal. No, not a shadow, that was_ movement _, someone was in there-!_

* * *

 

Aladdin jolted awake at the loud yell somewhere above his head, seeing red-pink hair fly around Morgiana out of the corner of his eye as she whirled around at the side of the bed back to its occupants. He tumbled around in the covers a moment, half-aware and half-really not, because it if wasn't him or Morgiana, then Alibaba-!

Was sitting up in the middle of the bed, panting unevenly and wild-eyed, shaking hard enough Aladdin could feel it without touching him, reaching out to the end of the bed blindly, as if trying to stop someone from falling of a cliff edge. 

"Alibaba?" Morgiana asked gently, staring at their King with wide, worried eyes. Aladdin just about jumped out of his skin when Alibaba jerked to look at her, looking _through_ her for a moment before he focused on her. 

"Morg . . ." was all he managed to say, dazedly not-focusing on her. He was calming down, but still trembling faintly. 

"Nightmare?" Aladdin croaked, then winced. He must've been snoring with his mouth open again, it felt like a scorpion had made its bed in there. He swallowed, felt his dry throat click unpleasantly, and could've blubbered on Morgiana in gratitude when she absently brought over a glass of water ( _left there the night before in case of exactly this_ ).

"No." Alibaba whispered. He was still unfocused, and now he was squinting like the soft morning light was too much. "The opposite, I think. Maybe." He looked over to the west wall, looking through it and not seeing it at all. And frowning. Not sad. No, this was his planning frown. He was silent a few moments, in which Morgiana and Aladdin exchanged glances and decided to leave it alone until he talked about it himself. "I need to ask Sinbad a few questions." He said abruptly, startling Aladdin almost enough to spill his water. Throwing off the covers, he sped around the room hurriedly but neatly, fussed at his hair a moment before giving up ( _again, he did it every time he had access to a mirror and whenever he or Morgiana asked, he just looked at them as if they were mad, because he really didn't notice himself doing it, it was just part of his routine_ ) and stalked out of the room at a fast pace. 

Aladdin scrambled out of bed and scampered around the room to get presentable himself, getting Morgiana to help with his hair, and they were off after their King.

They should've been worried, and they were, but . . . somehow, everything seemed new. Grand. The beginning of an _adventure_.

Morgiana and he exchanged glances, speech-without-words of people who knew each other well enough not to need them, and grinned. 

_'I can't wait!'_


	2. Destiny Speaks in Metaphor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alibaba has questions, and is convinced Sinbad has answers. Sinbad mostly just wants Alibaba out of his bedroom.

Contrary to what most would expect, Sinbad loved mornings. They were gorgeous, seeing the sun come up, that muzzy-sleepy feeling of being at peace, the lethargy of slowly getting out of bed to prepare for a day. He was fond of it, really.

Just, mornings weren't very fond of _him_. 

He tripped getting out of bed, every time. He actually got fed up enough to get Yamraiha to check for curses, and after she indulged him (giggling at his misfortune, the cruel witch) informed him grandly he was merely clumsy in the morning. He also bumped into the doorway (it _moved_ , he'd swear to it), knocked his knees on tables (they reached out to do it, he was _convinced_ ) and fell on his face getting dressed (he wasn't sure if his clothes were pranking him or if the floor just wanted to kiss him good morning).

_Every. Single. Day._

This day, though, he'd be spared most of that (the doorway was tireless in its abuse of his person, alas). 

Sinbad was in the routine of getting out of bed at a glacier's pace, or _not_ getting out in other words, when his door _'thwumped!'_ open.

He was awake and on a hair-trigger the instant he heard the door move.

Jafar had long since given up waking him before he was good and ready to get up. No one else had anywhere near the courage and/or rank to just barge into his _bedroom_. So, emergency, went Sinbad's not very coherent but understandable thinking.

Alibaba Saluja with a strangely familiar determined/confused look on his face was _not_ what he was expecting. 

"Have you ever had dreams about adventures, quests or things like that?" came out of the Prince's mouth as Sinbad was in the process of getting his reflexes to stand down, dammit, there's no threat here. Probably.

"What?" came out automatically, most of Sinbad's attention focused on they way the Universe had started _singing_. Not unlike it did constantly around magi - hearing that around Judal was always strange, because he always associated the singing with _Yunan_ and those were two _very_ different people to be hearing similar things around - but this was a greater composition, the likes of which was played by Masters of their craft on the finest of instruments. It was faint, not fully developed and it might not burst into fullness at all, but the potential for something glorious was there, threading through the world.

"Sinbad!" And the Sindrian King's attention snapped away from the Great Music of the Universe to the steadily-more-irritated mortal Prince in front of him. In his _bedroom_. Because that last bit bore repeating, it did.

"What?" Sinbad asked again, attention on Alibaba and getting his thoughts in order, because the young man was in _his bedroom_ and Sinbad was only mostly awake.

Alibaba's level of irritation went up another notch, almost visible as his left eyebrow twitched in sheer annoyance, and he repeated himself.

Sinbad wasn't anymore sure of why the young Prince was _in his bedroom_ , but he began to understand why the blond was wearing a familiar expression. 

Gods, he felt old sometimes. Was he ever going to get to go on another adventure, or was his Legend finished?

A throat clearing echoed around his room, and once more Sinbad brought his attention back to- whoa, that was a Rashid Expression. One from the Annoyed Category, thankfully, not the Angry or Pissed Off ones. The man may never have conquered a Dungeon, but he could still be damn Scary. The Expression Alibaba wore communicated 'I am wondering what was slipped in your drink because you can _not_ be this idiotic/dozy/scatter-brained _naturally_ '. Sinbad knew that one fairly well, the Merchant King had sent it his way pretty frequently in their early years of friendship. 

_'I think I'll be a little offended by that. Later.'_

"Do you know what this is about?" Alibaba all but demanded, looking about ready to jump on the bed to get at Sinbad. Definitely holding onto patience by his fingernails. Sinbad remembered that feeling all to well. There were things that needed doing, they needed to be done quickly, why aren't these people feeling the urgency? The answer was, no one else could feel it, what Sinbad and now apparently Alibaba had was a gift for sensing the Universe moving around them, and now it was calling on another person to help Destiny, Fate or some such along.

 "Yes, I'm fairly certain I do know, and I will answer your questions . . ." Sinbad began, seeing that Alibaba wasn't going to let anything go just because he was only now waking up, "during breakfast," Sinbad finished. "Now please get out of my room, I promise I'll tell you. And give you some advice, you're probably going to need it."

Alibaba gave him a narrow-eyed stare - 'I'm ascertaining whether or not you can be trusted as you seem a bit shifty at the moment', another Rashid-Expression frequent visitor - before nodding, glaring at him - 'my patience is vast but not infinite, do your best not to try it', Sinbad was going to mention this to Alibaba at some point because this was honestly a bit funny - and departing.

Sinbad flopped back on his bed gracelessly, and tried to decide if it was worth wasting his breath cursing Fate. Being as this was undoubtably Destiny come a-calling, he figured he'd save it for another occasion.

Time to get ready for the day. And for Alibaba to get ready for an Adventure. 

**Author's Note:**

> Lemme know what you think. Seriously, I need help and advice for this thing, I think it's gonna be a monster.


End file.
